This is the eternal question and in many ways it’s the wrong question. Sure, social media can lead to hard results but it’s about much more than money, it’s about building brand awareness, engaging with your customers, and putting a positive image of your business out in the world.

Having said that, it’s also good to know what works and doesn’t work in your approach to social media.

For those of you still interested in measuring ROI I would suggest trying a social media campaign. (If the word ‘campaign’ fills you with dread, call it an experiment!)

Steps towards a social media campaign

1. Set yourself a goal. It can be a certain number of leads, sign ups or site traffic. Your goal will differ depending on your business, so create one that’s right for you.
2. Decide on a particular theme for your campaign. Do you have an event to promote? A particular discount you’d like to generate interest for?
3. Give yourself a clear timetable, one that gives you enough time to really chart a change.
4. Before starting you need to establish what a ‘normal’ non-campaign week/fortnight looks like: how many views, how much traffic? What’s your number of followers?
5. How are you going to promote it? Don’t think just of tweets/statuses: create images, infographics, videos, podcasts, blogs, etc. They need to be suitable and formatted correctly for the channels you’ll be using during the campaign. Use a tool such as Canva to format them.
6. Create a timetable for your activity (in other words don’t just spew all of your information on just one day, space it out!)
7. Include a clear call to action in each of your posts, with a link generated through an app such as bitly which allows you to track where and how many times people have clicked on the link.
8. Install a tracker on your website (or the page on which you want people to land) such as Google Analytics to find out where your traffic has been coming from and analyse the bounce rate. Make the most of the analytics tools that twitter and Facebook have to offer too, especially if you’re running an ad campaign.

Once your mini campaign is over take stock: which channels got you the most views? Which posts had the most success? How many leads or sign ups did you get? Has your number of followers increased or decreased?

It’s likely that you will be seeing positive change, change that you can now measure and set out in a report.

A return on investment indeed!